Identifying and Advocating Best Practices in the Criminal Justice System. A Texas-Centric Examination of Current Conditions, Reform Initiatives, and Emerging Issues with a Special Emphasis on Capital Punishment.

Lawyers think no problem has been invented that they can’t puzzle through, solve or argue their way out of.

So, there’s reason to pause when they throw up their hands and walk
away from a fight. That’s what the nation’s pre-eminent group of legal
scholars and practitioners has done with capital punishment. It says
that problems associated with the death penalty are “intractable” —
that the system is so broken that it no longer is willing to lend it
legitimacy.

The American Law Institute has a significant
stature in the legal profession, analogous to the National Academy of
Sciences. It strives to improve, simplify and promote certainty within
broad categories of law — such as contracts, remedies, property,
trusts, torts, unfair competition, remedies and criminal law. Its work
is painstaking in detail, glacial in pace and technical in nature.

And:

An increasing number of Americans see the death penalty for what it
is: a brutal, freakish system of punishment that is resistant to
competent administration and that is dehumanizing to us all.

Now, even the sharpest lawyers are distancing themselves from the
most severe punishment. They have concluded that it’s not worth trying
to fix — or even to make an argument on its behalf. It cannot be fixed.

Capital punishment
is one of those subjects where everything that needs to be said has
pretty much been said by anyone who's got anything to say about it.
People for it or against it have pretty much dug in their heels, rarely
budging from their positions.

That's why it's astonishing that the American Law Institute this week officially decided to abandon its longtime support for the death penalty – an institution of our criminal justice system that this group helped shape.

This
is a stunning sea change. The law institute is one of the most
respected organizations in the country and perhaps the most influential
organization in shaping the contours of American criminal law.

This organization of some 4,000 lawyers, judges and law professors
represents the only group able to put together an intellectual argument
and a rational model for the application of the death penalty.

But
since doing that in 1962, it has now conceded, almost 50 years later,
that the evidence draws a different conclusion: That the capital
justice system in the United States is, in fact, capricious, racially
unjust, unreliable and incapable of assuring us that the innocent will
not be put to death in error.

We saw a lot of bad death penalty-related news last year--the probable
execution of innocent men in Texas, the attacks by a prosecutor on the Medill Innocence Project students at Northwestern University, and the horrific failed attempt at an execution in Ohio.

But the year also brought this news: the American Law Institute, which
has been credited with creating the intellectual framework for the
modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, apparently
pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it last year.

This could represent a significant shift away from putting prisoners to death in the U.S. A Berkeley law professor quoted in a New York Times story about A.L.I. called the group the death penalty's "only intellectually respectable support."

The Institute did not decide formally to oppose the death penalty as
some of its members apparently wanted, but in a statement last October
conceded there are "intractable institutional and structural obstacles
to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital
punishment."

Seems to me, that's tantamount to saying there's no way for state killing to be done fairly or right.

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The StandDown Texas Project

The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas' application of the death penalty.
To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.

Steve Hall

Project Director Steve Hall was chief of staff to the Attorney General of Texas from 1983-1991; he was an administrator of the Texas Resource Center from 1993-1995. He has worked for the U.S. Congress and several Texas legislators. Hall is a former journalist.